Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1324 i The Week

What happened The vaccine wars The UK marked the anniversary of the first national lockdown with a minute’s silence on Tuesday in memory of the 126,000 Britons who have lost their lives to Covid-19. Boris Johnson said the year had been “one of the most difficult in our country’s history”, but that the nation was “step by step, jab by jab” on the road to recovery. He warned, however, that a third wave of coronavirus in continental Europe, where cases are rising, would inevitably “wash up on our shores as well”. Johnson insisted that, despite concerns about vaccine supplies, the Government was on course to hit its target of vaccinating all adults by the end of July. A fall in the UK’s supply of the AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccine is expected…

Prince Harry, who has a new job, as a senior executive at a $1bn Silicon Valley start-up which offers professional coaching to individuals and businesses. The precise nature of his role at the San Francisco based company BetterUp has not been disclosed, but his job title is Chief Impact Officer. Clive Myrie, with news that he is to become the new host of Mastermind, taking over from John Humphrys. The journalist and newsreader will start filming the BBC programme in July. The NHS, after dexamethasone, an inexpensive and widely available steroid, was found to have saved around a million lives worldwide since June, when the NHS Recovery drug trial programme established its potential as a treatment for Covid-19. Around 22,000 of those lives were in the UK.…

40% of Britons expect to do more walking after the pandemic than they did before. 31% say they anticipate doing more of their shopping locally. Ipsos MORI/BBC 40% of Britons think that the UK has been able to respond better to the pandemic owing to Brexit; 14% think the opposite. Ipsos MORI/Daily Telegraph 47% of UK adults think there should be a public inquiry into the Government’s handling of the pandemic, with legal powers to compel people to give evidence under oath. 18% are opposed to the idea. For those wanting an inquiry, the most pressing line of enquiry is the Government’s preparedness for a pandemic. ICM/The Guardian…

“Impostor syndrome, a term to describe unwarranted feelings of inadequacy at work, particularly in women, is often seen as a bad thing. But a new study from Wharton business school has found it can be a positive: those who have it, recognising they don’t know it all, tend to be better at listening and collaborating. Much of the advice given to women at work in recent years has been focused on how to be more assertive. Do a power pose! Demand a pay rise! Act like a man! Wouldn’t it be more helpful if we encouraged mediocre men to aspire to the competence of underpaid and overqualified women? The last thing the world needs is more leaders who are trying to fake it till they make it.” Arwa Mahdawi in…

Rishi Sunak did well: the US did better Ed Conway The Times Amazing what you get used to, says Ed Conway. Had we been told in March 2020 that, in a year’s time, 17% of UK employees would still be getting paid by the state to sit at home, we’d have scoffed in disbelief. Yet today the furlough scheme is “part of the economic furniture”. But it’s not beyond reproach. Yes, it was a bold response to an unprecedented threat; yes, it saved millions of jobs; yes, it helped millions tolerate lockdown. Whisper it quietly, however: the money could have been better spent. The way the US did, for instance. Rather than pay employees to stay at home, the US hiked up unemployment benefits and sent stimulus cheques to every…

Growing “embryos” in the lab Researchers have used skin cells to grow organic “models” of human embryos. The structures closely resemble blastocysts – embryos that are a few days old, when they may consist of fewer than 100 cells, and are barely bigger than a pin head. The hope is that this feat, described in two papers published in Nature, will help researchers to better understand the process by which a single cell becomes a human being – and how that process can go wrong, leading to infertility and miscarriage. For obvious reasons, scientists cannot easily study embryos in the womb; and studying them in the lab is controversial. So recently, they have been coaxing cells to grow into entities that resemble very primitive embryos. The new research goes further,…

Anna Wintour isn’t the first editor of US Vogue to have a tough reputation. In a new book on the magazine’s history, Diana Vreeland’s leadership style (from 1963 to 1971) is likened to a Roman gladiatorial contest. “More than one editor threatened to throw herself out of a window,” recalls Grace Mirabella. “Secretaries quit left and right... I’d hear screams all the time from the closet.” Orlando Bloom has shed revealing light on his life in California. In The Sunday Times, the actor – who lives in LA with his fiancée, singer Katy Perry – explains that he starts each day with Buddhist chanting, after which he’ll “read a bit of Buddhism”; next up is breakfast, which consists of “green powders” mixed with “brain octane oil”, and a collagen powder…

For female students, walking around Latymer Upper – an independent school in west London – could be a frightening experience, said Ben Ellery in The Times. Former pupils have described being surrounded by boys in corridors, pushed into corners, and groped. At weekends, they say they were expected to perform sex acts on boys at parties. The boys would then write “slut” on their lockers. These accounts are disturbing, but Latymer (which is holding an inquiry into these and other allegations) is only one of a slew of schools that have been accused of being hotbeds of misogynistic bullying and sexual violence. Former pupils of Westminster School have compiled a dossier containing scores of abuse allegations. In an even longer dossier, Highgate School is accused of ignoring and even silencing…

The Six Nations doesn’t always deliver thrilling rugby, said Robert Kitson in The Guardian. But when it does, it does so spectacularly. Such was the case with Saturday’s fifth-round clash between Wales and France, which is sure to go down as one of rugby’s “all-time great games”. Victory for Wales would have given them the Grand Slam – their fifth in the past 16 years. And with just three minutes left on the clock and Wayne Pivac’s side leading 30-20, that appeared inevitable. But there then followed five minutes of “absolute madness”, said Will Kelleher in The Mail on Sunday. Les Bleus, down to 14 men, seized on Wales having two men in the sin bin to score two tries – the second coming with the clock at 81 minutes…

Men’s responsibility... To The Times Not all men are rapists, but all men have a voice. Using it to tell women how to dress and when they can walk the streets is making rape a female responsibility. Instead, let’s use it to have a word with that friend or colleague who makes women uncomfortable, and to acknowledge that, overwhelmingly, this is a problem caused by men. Jim Corrib, London ...and women’s too To The Times I feel for the family of Sarah Everard, but I disagree with your leader. Your suggestion that men should cross the road to avoid women is archaic. Why? All men are not threats. You are breeding fear. I take responsibility for my own safety. I do not expect a city ever to be safe at…

Gormley’s “sex toys” Last year, four distinctly “phallic” sculptures by Antony Gormley appeared on a beach at Aldeburgh in Suffolk, said Craig Simpson in The Daily Telegraph. The works elicited a hostile reaction from locals, who likened them to “sex toys” and “giant dog poo”. Now, Gormley himself has described the arrangement as an unauthorised “misrepresentation” of his work. Created in 2001 as part of a £60m project to regenerate Peckham, where Gormley has a studio, the sculptures – Oval, Peg, Penis and Snowman – were originally designed as street bollards, and stood outside a local pub until it was demolished in 2005. They were later bought by Aldeburgh gallery owner Caroline Wiseman, who installed them on the beach. She submitted a retrospective planning application, prompting an objection from Gormley’s…

Eddie is outraged at Clarrie being sacked from the play. He resigns in protest but says he’ll continue on the rival Darrington production. Leonard’s birthday gift to Ben of a “time capsule” is an unexpected hit. After much deliberation, David and Ruth decide to take Brian up on the offer of grazing Brookfield’s sheep at Home Farm. At the hospital, Alice tells Jennifer she’s having difficulties – she’s worried the baby doesn’t like her and that she’s already let her down. Jennifer tells her to be patient. Later, when baby Martha latches on, Alice feels full maternal love. Kirsty asks Susan to take over Clarrie’s role in the play – Susan doesn’t want to betray her friend, but Clarrie says she’s fine with it. Jazzer and Leonard chat about the…

The wine seller who shocked France Steven Spurrier, who died this month, was responsible for the “single most influential wine tasting ever”, said Jancis Robinson in the FT. It took place in 1976, at the wine shop in Paris he owned at that time. To share his enthusiasm for the wines of California, he invited a group of eminent French critics to a tasting which pitted Californian chardonnays and cabernets against a selection of grand French wines. Fearing their palates “would be prejudiced against the American upstarts”, he decided to make the tasting blind – and was as shocked as anyone when “California swept the board”. The “Judgement of Paris”, as it became known, caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, said The Daily Telegraph. Americans were delighted:…

Celina Digby outdoor waterproof wipe clean garden tablecloth These wipe-able tablecloths come in a variety of prints and sizes. This cheerful Midsummer Morning Floral pattern is a nice one for summer evenings in the garden (from £50; etsy.com). Kreafunk aGlow A Bluetooth speaker and a light, the aGlow comes in three finishes and has a handle, making it easy to carry around. Its battery will run for ten hours, and it has a built-in microphone for hands-free calls (£150; kreafunk.com). Nomad Patara cushion Made entirely from plastic bottles, Nomad’s vibrant cushions and rugs are especially hard-wearing and can be used outdoors or indoors (£75; weavergreen.com). Cane-Line dark green soft rope basket These rope baskets are a useful place to stash anything – from blankets to picnic accessories – to keep…

Goldman Sachs: junior revolt Banking is notorious for its long working hours – and the pandemic doesn’t seem to have improved matters. Last week, a group of 13 Goldman Sachs first-year bankers begged the Wall Street giant to cap the working week at 80 hours, arguing that “inhumane” expectations were leading to mental health issues, said BBC Business. An internal survey showed they averaged 95 hours a week and slept just five hours a night. We’ve been here before, said Marcus Ashworth and Elisa Martinuzzi on Bloomberg. “Back in the mid-2010s, a spate of work-related deaths among junior bankers” spurred Goldman and others “to enforce at least one day of rest over the weekend”. Clearly, old habits die hard. “Working crazy hours to meet unrealistic deadlines” is still thought…

Controversy of the week Misogyny and the law In 2016, Nottinghamshire Police Force became the first in the UK to classify misogyny as a hate crime. For one young woman, it was life-changing, said Dipesh Gadher and Tom Calver in The Sunday Times. Her lunchtime walk past a construction site to a sandwich shop had become unbearable: she had been subjected daily to verbal abuse “so sexually explicit” that it brought her to tears. At last, she reported it to the police. Officers visited the site and told workers that their behaviour was potentially unlawful; it stopped. Sue Fish, Nottinghamshire’s former chief constable, who introduced the policy, is convinced that it has encouraged women to report abuse and harassment that would otherwise have gone unrecorded, and helped “rebuild the confidence…

Wally, an Arctic walrus, which went off course and landed up first in Ireland, and then on the coast of Pembrokeshire. Tourists have been asked not to disturb the juvenile, which is about the size of a cow. In London, animal lovers were mourning the death of a seal, which had made its home on the banks of the Thames upstream from Hammersmith. Dubbed Freddie Mercury, it had to be euthanised after being attacked by a dog. John Lewis, which announced that eight of its 42 stores will not reopen when lockdown ends, putting some 1,500 jobs at risk. Four of the closures are of the retailer’s smaller At Home stores; the other four are department stores in York, Peterborough, Sheffield and Aberdeen.…

Glasgow Deadly infection from hospital: An infection “probably” linked to the water supply at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow was the primary cause of death of a young cancer patient in 2017, an inquiry found this week. The review, commissioned by Scotland’s Health Secretary, Jeane Freeman, looked into the cases of 84 children who’d developed infections while being treated at the hospital. It found that a third of the infections had probably originated there, and that the rest had “possibly” originated there. Two children died; one was named by her mother as ten-year-old Milly Main, who was being treated for leukaemia at the children’s hospital. She went into toxic shock after contracting an infection from a catheter, and died days later. Freeman said the report highlighted “serious failings”…

Bear Grylls on failure Bear Grylls didn’t excel at Eton, either at sports or in his studies. But he ran the school mountaineering club, took up karate, and learned the value of determination. It served Grylls, 46, well when he joined the SAS reserves, and in his later career too – and he thinks there’s a lesson in that. “So much of education culture is about celebrating people who are sporting, academic or maybe even good looking,” he told Damian Whitworth in The Times. “But, actually, life doesn’t care about those things.” The “heroes of school”, he says, may do less well as adults, because they’ve not learnt about failure. By contrast, “Little Tommy is neither sporty, good looking or academic and never gets picked for anything. But he’s doing…

The Taiwanese government has urged people to stop officially changing their names to “salmon” – after scores did so just to take advantage of a restaurant offer. The phenomenon – dubbed “salmon chaos” by local media – came about when a sushi chain offered a free meal to anyone whose ID contained “gui yu”, the Chinese characters for salmon. But officials stepped in after people began changing their names to monikers such as “Explosive Good Looking Salmon” and “Meteor Salmon King”. Deputy interior minister Chen Tsung-yen implored people to stop, saying it was causing “unnecessary paperwork”. A waxwork Donald Trump was removed from display in Texas – after visitors kept attacking it. The figure of the former president was pulled from Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks because of deep gouges inflicted by…

SOUTH AFRICA Is our policing system broken beyond repair? Daily Maverick (Johannesburg) One of the most disturbing legacies of apartheid, says Zipho Majova, is South Africa’s entrenched “culture of police brutality”. In the year 2018/19 alone, police were accused of a “whopping” 4,105 instances of torture and assault, including beating, electrocution and suffocation – and that’s only the reported cases. Worse, some 393 people were “killed as a result of police action” in the same period. This “scourge” was brought into sharp focus last August by the killing of Nathaniel Julies, a 16-year-old unarmed black boy with Down’s Syndrome who was shot by a police officer outside his home in Johannesburg. But nothing has changed: this month, police have been accused of shooting dead Mthokozisi Ntumba, an innocent, unarmed black…

In 1901, sponge divers discovered the wreck of a 2,000-year-old Roman cargo ship off the Greek island of Antikythera. Scores of artefacts were retrieved, including statues and jewellery – and the corroded remains of what is now regarded as the first analogue computer. Known as the Antikythera mechanism, the device seems to have been a hand-powered astrological clock, housed in a wooden case, that would have shown the movements of the five known planets and predicted the phases of the Moon, as well as lunar and solar eclipses. As only about a third of it survived, in 82 fragments, how it functioned has long been a mystery. But now, a team at UCL has devised a model for how its bronze gears could have been arranged to allow for the…

“I hope no one from the Government reads this column,” said Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. “I’m worried it might annoy them.” And causing annoyance may soon be against the law. Last week, MPs voted in favour of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill, which will seriously curtail the right to protest in England and Wales. Police will be given the power to break up non-violent demonstrations, if they are too noisy, or might cause “serious annoyance”. What exactly constitutes “serious annoyance” is unclear. “But it could, potentially, get you up to ten years in jail.” The bill is outrageous, said Ian Birrell in the I newspaper – a genuine threat to liberty and democracy in this country. It is “a populist stunt” to appease the Conservative…

In what other country would a minister be sneered at by its national broadcaster for displaying the national flag in his office, asked Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail. That’s exactly what happened when the BBC Breakfast TV presenters Naga Munchetty and Charlie Stayt interviewed the Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick over Zoom last week. A smirking Stayt teased Jenrick, saying that the flag was “not up to standard size”, while Munchetty mocked his portrait of the Queen. Viewers, though, don’t find the “anti-British culture” that infects the BBC very funny; they complained in droves. The presenters were reprimanded, and Munchetty apologised for “liking” tweets which ridiculed the “flag-wavers” and “flag-shaggers’’. Flag-waving is certainly all the rage in today’s politics, said John Harris in The Guardian. The new Downing Street briefing…

As a youth coach at Crewe Alexandra and Manchester City, Barry Bennell fed “dreams of being the next big star” to the boys in his care, said Kyle O’Sullivan in the Daily Mirror. A charming man with a “mesmerising” personality, he easily won the trust of parents, who’d think nothing of letting their sons stay overnight at his house. But Bennell’s charisma was a front: he was a predatory paedophile who “destroyed a succession of young lives” in a career lasting from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. And we now know he was one of many such men in English football. The horrifying scale of abuse over this period has been laid bare by a new BBC documentary, Football’s Darkest Secret, which follows the publication last week of an FA-commissioned…

To The Guardian As someone who believes strongly that Britain and the world owe a huge debt of gratitude to Winston Churchill, I find little to disagree with in Priyamvada Gopal’s take on the current re-examination of the reputation of one of our greatest PMs (“Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Churchill?”). There is no doubt that Churchill entertained racist views, rightly viewed now as reprehensible, albeit ones that would have been unexceptional in his day. The reputation of any figure is not enhanced if his supporters simply go into denial over how he truly viewed the world. However, Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square was not erected to celebrate the enlightened views of a social liberal, but to recognise a war leader who achieved what few believed possible when…

“Unfettered by loyalty to any one genre”, the American singer-songwriter Valerie June is “a musician’s dream” – and her third album is an “absolute stunner”, said Dan Cairns in The Sunday Times. Ranging across soul, jazz, folk and country, she sings with “unblinking self-awareness about longing, gratitude, obsession and rapture”. And her voice is extraordinary: sometimes “like a sigh, sometimes a sharp-edged keen”, and sometimes a “full-throated holler”. Yet it’s never the sound of a singer “showboating”; it’s one “digging deep for the hidden gold”. It’s a “sensational” album. Subtitled Prescriptions For Dreamers, this wonderful collection will surely feature on album of the year lists, agreed Will Hodgkinson in The Times. The elements of rootsy folk in June’s music “touch on the transcending otherness” that Van Morrison evoked on Astral…

Film critics have never been entirely in tune with the viewing public, said Jack Malvern in The Times – but new analysis suggests that the gap between what critics like and what cinema goers enjoy is wider now than ever. For his study, statistician Stephen Follows compared audience scores on IMDb with those of the critics on the aggregator Metacritic, for more than 10,000 films, and found that they have been diverging for the past 20 years. He divides the contentious films into “crowd-pleasers” that critics hated, and “critical darlings” that the public abhorred. The former category included the 2001 romantic drama Sweet November, and the gangster caper Snatch (2000). La La Land (2016) and Gravity (2013) were among the high-profile films the critics loved that the public was not…

Best books… Robin Dunbar The scientist, writer and discoverer of Dunbar’s Number – the suggested number of people with whom humans can maintain stable social relationships – picks his favourite books. His new book, Friends (Little, Brown £20), is out now The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, 1952 (Arrow £6.99). Hemingway’s novella is a seamless meditation on the indomitable human spirit in the face of overwhelming tragedy. Scotland’s Empire by Tom Devine, 2003 (Penguin £12.99). This is a stark reminder of how a homeland bereft of most usable resources resulted in Scots emigrating in astonishing numbers from the 1300s onwards, my own grandfather among them. The best educational system in the world made them the bedrock on which the expansion of the empire and its multicultural foundations…

If months of staring at the same four walls have left you yearning for new artwork, look no further than The Affordable Online Art Fair, which returns for its second year with 50 international galleries convening in the “Digital Marketplace” from 9 April to 3 May. There will be the usual mix of interviews and talks, gallery tours and advice on collecting, all delivered in a virtual format, with artworks starting from £50. If you would rather wait for the real thing, there are plans for the spring edition of the fair to take place in Battersea from 24 to 27 June, regulations permitting. To sign up for both and receive updates, visit affordableartfair.com.…

The English asparagus season begins shortly, says Theo Randall – and here’s a great way to showcase this vegetable. Combining burnt butter with burrata may sound odd, but believe me it works. It’s important to remember to cook the asparagus slowly in the oil (thicker stems tend to work better than thinner). Fried sage, pangrattato and a grating of parmesan finish the dish beautifully. Serves 2 as a starter 200g asparagus, tough ends trimmed 1 tbsp good olive oil 50g unsalted butter 6 sage leaves 2 x 125g burrata 50g pangrattato (see below) 50g parmesan, finely grated sea salt and freshly ground black pepper for the pangrattato: 50ml sunflower oil 1 garlic clove, quartered 50g fresh or dried breadcrumbs • To make the pangrattato, place the sunflower oil in a…

Yaphet Kotto 1939-2021 Originally a stage actor, Yaphet Kotto, who has died aged 81, established himself as a screen star with his scene-stealing performance in the 1973 Bond film Live and Let Die. In a dual role, Kotto played Dr Kananga, the corrupt dictator of a fictional Caribbean island, and his alter ego, fearsome Harlem gangster Mr Big. Released at the height of the Blaxploitation era, it was the first Bond film to have a black villain, and the first to have a black woman as 007’s love interest (Gloria Hendry); but when Kotto gave a black power salute at an early press junket, producers started to become anxious about how a black Bond villain would be received, said The Times. Kotto was left out of other publicity events, and…

The S&P 500 was reported to be up by nearly 75% from its low point in March 2020. But elsewhere the “reopening trade” in global markets stumbled, amid mounting worries over a new wave of the virus in Europe and the EU’s move to tighten vaccine exports. The US dollar hit a near four-month high. Turkey was rocked by the sacking of its central bank chief – the third to be fired by President Erdogan in less than two years – which prompted heavy selling in the country’s assets: the Turkish lira plummeted 15% on the news. The G7 called on the IMF to expand its reserves to help the world’s poorest countries. In Britain, sharply lower clothes prices and cheaper second-hand cars caused an unexpected fall in the February…

● Policy vs. markets Last week’s Federal Reserve press conference “should have been a time for chair Jay Powell to bask in the newly upgraded forecasts for US economic growth”, said the FT. Instead, he found himself mired in an inflation row. The Fed now thinks the economy will expand at 6.5% this year and overshoot the 2% inflation target. That left Powell “in the awkward position of explaining why the Fed is not tightening its signalled path for monetary policy”. Powell has given some “perfectly respectable answers” – yet market participants don’t seem to be buying them. “Bond yields keep rising”, indicating that speculators are betting that the Fed “cannot stay loose as long as it wants”. The phenomenon of markets “front-running the economy” is growing across the world.…

The case for taxing the wealthy Rhymer Rigby Financial Times “With an end to the pandemic in sight, policymakers’ minds are turning to replenishing Covid-depleted government coffers,” says Rhymer Rigby. It’s time they trained their guns on the rich. The arguments against imposing progressive taxes on wealthier people are well-known: it’s a break on wealth creation, and it drives money offshore. If you give the rich more, it is argued, “they spend more and everyone is richer”. This thinking, popularised by the US economist Arthur Laffer in the 1980s, has “proved remarkably persistent” – despite clear evidence to the contrary. A recent London School of Economics study, looking at 50 years of tax cuts across 18 OECD nations, concluded they did not increase competitiveness or GDP – but led to…

The week’s best shares BBGI Global Infrastructure The Mail on Sunday BBGI specialises in essential public services including fire stations, hospitals, roads, schools and prisons. Run by industry veterans, with a reputation for reliability. Prospects are bright and shares yield 4.36%. Buy. 166p. Fastned The Sunday Telegraph Fastned’s Dutch network of rapid roadside charging stations for electric vehicles isn’t yet profitable, but the company promises 30% returns when stations reach peak efficiency. Expanding in Europe. Buy. s66.50. Greggs Investors Chronicle A stock-market darling in 2019, the pastry chain suffered a 36.2% sales fall in 2020, prompting an unprecedented loss. But digital investment has boosted deliveries and a rapid return to sales growth is expected. Buy. £23.06. ITM Power The Times ITM makes and installs electrolysers that use renewable energy to…

Cornwall has overtaken London as the most searched-for location on the website Rightmove. In January and February, searches for homes in some villages in the county – including Polperro – were 203% higher than in the same months last year. Rightmove said that more than half of house-hunters in London are looking for homes outside the city, up from 39% last year. A private girls school in Brighton has become the first to offer pupils a skateboarding scholarship. Rosie McColl, headteacher of Brighton Girls, said she wanted to encourage girls to take up the sport, because learning and then performing tricks on skateboards requires “perseverance and body confidence”.…

Asylum seekers who arrive in Britain by unofficial routes will be denied indefinite leave to remain, even if their application is successful, as part of a new two-tier system. Home Secretary Priti Patel said that disadvantaging migrants who enter Britain via “safe” countries in Europe would “break the people-smugglers’ business model”, and save lives. Under her proposed shake-up, these migrants would, if granted asylum, only be given temporary protection status, which means they’d be regularly reassessed for removal, and denied benefits. By contrast, successful applicants entering Britain via new “safe and legal routes” would be granted immediate indefinite leave to remain (rather than having to wait five years as they do now), and funds to help them start a new life. Patel has also proposed holding illegal immigrants in reception…

Amsterdam Rutte victory: Mark Rutte, the Netherlands’ caretaker PM, claimed victory in last week’s general election, putting him on course for a fourth term. His People’s Party won 22% of the vote – slightly more than in the previous election – and 35 of 150 seats. Rutte, 54, known as the “Teflon” PM, has remained relatively popular, despite presiding over a high Covid death toll, the country’s worst riots in decades and a child benefit scandal that led to his government resigning en masse in January. His party is now trying to form a new coalition. The election’s big surprise was the success of D66, a pro-EU liberal party, which came second, taking 24 seats; far-right parties also did well. Paris Rape ruling: In a long-running case that has sparked…

1* Elephant Gun by Zach Condon, performed by Beirut 2 Sit Down by the Fire by Shane MacGowan, performed by The Pogues 3 Lovesong by Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Roger O’Donnell, Porl Thompson, Boris Williams & Lol Tolhurst, performed by The Cure 4 Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 31 by Frédéric Chopin, performed by Martha Argerich 5 The Bends, written and performed by Radiohead 6 Little Star, written and performed by Stina Nordenstam 7 Feeling Good by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, performed by Nina Simone 8 Prophet (Better Watch It) by Jordan Stephens, Harvey Alexander-Sule, James Dring and Jody Street, performed by Rizzle Kicks Book: Selected Stories by Alice Munro Luxury: the National Museum of Ireland * Choice if allowed only one record…

A dark kitchen – sometimes called a ghost or virtual kitchen – is a separate unit, set up entirely to prepare meals for delivery. These units, where teams of chefs prepare hundreds of portions of food a night, are found on industrial estates and in warehouses across Britain’s big cities. The biggest site is on the Park Royal industrial estate, known as “London’s kitchen”, which claims to manufacture a third of the city’s prepared meals. Dark kitchens allow restaurants to increase their output while paying a fraction of the rental prices charged on the high street. They also enable new “virtual” restaurants to set up shop without incurring anything like the usual costs. Deliveroo has its own dark kitchen business, Deliveroo Editions, with 16 “hubs” where units are leased to…

A party that disdains its own policies Jonathan Chait NYMag.com Don’t provoke us, or else when we win power, we’ll enact our agenda – and nobody wants that. Such is the weird argument Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell appeared to make last week in defence of the legislative filibuster, says Jonathan Chait. The Democrats are thinking of scrapping the procedure, which would allow laws to get through the Senate on a simple majority vote rather than, as at present, requiring a two-thirds supermajority. But be warned, said McConnell: if the filibuster is axed, he and his Republican colleagues will let rip when they win office. They’ll drive through all sorts of conservative policies: they’ll defund Planned Parenthood, bring in sweeping restrictions on abortion, give people the right to carry a…

Having the vaccine may alleviate some of the symptoms of long Covid, according to anecdotal reports from sufferers. Around one in ten people who test positive for the virus still have symptoms 12 weeks later. But doctors say that between 20% and 50% of patients are reporting an easing of symptoms after being vaccinated. It’s not clear if the effect is permanent, however: some people say they start to feel worse again after about three weeks; and there is a clear reporting bias. “The people who notice something remarkable are the ones shouting about it,” Dr David Strain (a member of the NHS’s Long Covid Taskforce) told The Daily Telegraph. Even so, he said that for patients struggling with symptoms for months, even a few weeks’ respite was welcome; and…

“All defence reviews are a gamble on the future of war,” said The Times, but that’s particularly true of the one unveiled by Downing Street this week. It’s a bold bet that our country’s interests are best served by “a smaller, more lethal army backed by high tech”. The defence command paper outlines plans to reduce the size of the regular Army from a theoretical 82,000 personnel to 72,500 by 2025 – making it a force far smaller than France’s, which numbers 115,000. About a third of the Army’s Challenger tanks will be mothballed, along with the RAF’s entire fleet of Hercules transport aircraft. But alongside these cuts, some £24bn of extra defence spending – “one of the biggest increases since the Cold War” – will be invested over the…

“Play is the exultation of the possible.” Philosopher Martin Buber, quoted in The Guardian “Quantity has a quality all of its own.” Attrib. Stalin, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?” Playwright Tom Stoppard, quoted in The Times “What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.” Mary Renault, quoted on ArtsJournal.com “There is no phrase more guaranteed to terrorise than ‘business casual’.” Robert Shrimsley in the FT “Delusions offer solutions.” Psychoanalyst Darian Leader, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.” Saul Bellow, quoted in The Observer “We must believe in free will. We have no choice.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted on The Browser “Politicians were mostly people…

The deciding game of England’s enthralling Twenty20 series against India was played on a “belter of a batting surface” at Ahmedabad, said Simon Wilde in The Sunday Times. “Runs flowed like wine” at an orgy. Put into bat, India scored a towering 224 for two wickets. England’s chase began brilliantly: after 12 overs they were 127 for one. But in the final quarter, India’s bowlers put on a “masterclass of variations”, and the visitors ended 36 runs short. This 3-2 series defeat (after a hammering in the Test series) leaves England’s plans for the autumn’s World Cup “under a haze”, said Tanya Aldred in The Observer. At times their bowlers looked short of ideas. They need a second spinner, said Michael Vaughan in The Daily Telegraph, as well as a…

From Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant to The Godfather Part II and beyond, countless films have touched on the experience of migrants and refugees. Here are five other interesting examples: Fear Eats the Soul Fassbinder’s scathing assault on German racism and intolerance is perhaps the most powerful of all his films. Released in 1974, it focuses on a romance between a Moroccan immigrant worker (El Hedi ben Salem, the director’s lover at the time), and a lonely, ageing cleaner (Brigitte Mira). Pressure Horace Ové’s 1976 drama was the first feature film with a black British director. Herbert Norville stars as a school-leaver living in Ladbroke Grove, torn between the restraining influence of his Trinidad-born parents, and anger at the racism he endures in his daily life. Goodbye Solo Now best known…

“From Ai Weiwei smashing a 2,000-year-old vase to the Chapman brothers defacing Goya prints, artists are no strangers to creative destruction,” said Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. But earlier this month, in Brooklyn, a new kind of destruction took place. In a carefully coordinated stunt, a group of masked men unveiled a Banksy screen print entitled Morons (White) and theatrically set it ablaze, live-streaming the act on Twitter. This was no anti-establishment protest. The men worked for a company called Injective Protocol, which had bought the print for $95,000 – purely “in order to destroy it” and then replace it with a unique digital facsimile. Improbably, their scheme paid off; the digital version of Banksy’s incinerated work sold for $382,336 – “more than four times the original price”. Stranger still,…

Tips of the week... how to have a micro wedding ● Having a limited number of guests has quite a few advantages. For a start, it opens up a whole new range of venue options: think cafés, bars, galleries, glamping sites, or even your own garden. ● If you opt for a large outdoor space, try dividing it into cosy zones for conversation. ● Invest in the details: go big on lighting, flowers, fabrics, seating and table decorations – and food, of course. ● If you’re worried there aren’t enough guests to fill a dance floor, think about getting some other kind of entertainer. ● You won’t need to catch up with 100 people on the day, so you could start a bit later and have a twilight ceremony. ●…

Lou Ottens 1926-2021 Lou Ottens, who has died aged 94, revolutionised the way people listen to music: in the early 1960s, the Dutch engineer invented the first cassette tape, and so paved the way for boom boxes, personal stereos – and the mixtapes beloved by millions of teenagers worldwide, said The Guardian. Then, in the 1980s, he helped develop the CD that superseded both the cassette and the LP. “From now on, the conventional record player is obsolete,” he said in 1982, as his company, Philips, unveiled the first compact disc player. “Nothing can match the sound of the CD,” he later said. The son of teachers, Lodewijk Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, in the Netherlands, in 1926, said The Daily Telegraph. As a child, he played with Meccano and,…

Deliveroo is preparing to serve up London’s “biggest stock market debut in a decade” – targeting a valuation of between £7.6bn and £8.8bn when it floats at the end of the month, said Matt Oliver in the Daily Mail. It marks the biggest deal of its kind since mining giant Glencore’s £38bn listing in 2011. If all goes to plan, there’ll be considerable fortunes made by leading shareholders such as founder CEO Will Shu. But analysts warned that the float was “at the high end” of expectations – and could face “a rough ride”. And so it should, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. It’s a mystery how Shu can float a business that lost £224m last year – “when the eating-out market was largely shut” – and claim it’s…

Beware the “star manager” Through the 1980s and 1990s, investment groups promoted “a cadre of elite managers” to attract and retain clients. Woodford, who made his name at Invesco, was a text-book case. But the “Woodford-centric” approach fostered a culture in which dissent wasn’t tolerated. Other fund managers were reluctant to join, knowing they’d be playing second fiddle. Watch out for style shifts Woodford’s reputation at Invesco was forged on his expertise at picking blue-chip UK companies with steady dividends. But he later began majoring on unquoted, or small listed companies. For every winner, “there was a stack of duds”. Treat best-buy lists with scepticism Many of Woodford’s “army of DIY investors” signed up when Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK’s most popular investment platform, added his funds to its “best-buy list”.…

James Watt and Martin Dickie The founders of Britain’s largest craft brewery started out in a shed on an industrial estate in Fraserburgh, Scotland, in 2007. It was just the two of them and a dog, so they named the company BrewDog. A year later, the pair applied to go on the BBC show Dragons’ Den, in the hope of securing finance – but were “binned” by the producers before even entering the Den, said the London Evening Standard. “They deemed Martin and myself not investment-worthy. We were totally crushed,” says James Watt. The duo wanted to offer a 20% stake in the fledgling firm for £100,000; that would now be worth about £360m – easily the biggest deal in Den history. “We got over the rejection eventually,” Watt adds,…